Perhaps this is special pleading, an anticipatory apologia for what may have to be done in this country if the far left ever comes to power, using th… - Peregrine Worsthorne

Social discipline—that surely is a more fruitful and warding theme for contemporary conservatism than individual freedom. Libertarian arguments forged at a time when there were still slaves and serfs to be freed from monarchical despotism, peasants from domineering landlords, or proletarians from brutal bosses, simply do not apply plausibly to the kind of social problems facing Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Britain is not the Soviet Union, and when Mrs Thatcher bends her knee to Solzenytsin, she is worshipping at the wrong shrine and going wrong where George Orwell went so wrong with his nightmare predictions of 1984. The spectre haunting most ordinary people in Britain is neither of a totalitarian State nor of Big Brother, but of other ordinary people being allowed to run wild. What they are worried about is crime, violence, disorder in the schools, promiscuity, idleness, pornography, football hooliganism, vandalism and urban terrorism. The film Clockwork Orange, with its terrible portrait of a gang of juvenile thugs bereft of all moral restraint, terrorising the old and the weak without mercy, is what most people fear today.

What is becoming clear is that apartheid is not at the heart of the racial issue. At the heart of it is the fact of Western superiority, resentment of which would remain even if revolution came to South Africa. This is what the liberal-progressive ideology so dangerously overlooks... The struggle for racial equality will be seen as a power struggle and because of this intimately bound up with all those revolutionary forces, both within these shores and outside them, aimed at weakening the West. The West in short can never hope to win the hearts of the Third World except by ceasing to be the West, since in reality it is its virtues, quite as much as its vices, that cause the hostility. It is in this sense that the liberal-progressive obsession with Britain's being on the right side of the race war is so unrealistic. It inculcates a Western inclination to self-abasement that plays into Soviet hands.

Powellism is now part of the English intellectual and moral tradition; part of the nation's mythology. The man, too, is a legend in his lifetime. So in a sense his work is done. For whatever eventually happens to him his ideas have now entered the bloodstream of the British body politic, guaranteeing them a kind of immortality. Of no other living British statesman could the same be said.